Comment Re:Decapitation. (Score 1) 483
My personal stance on the legitimacy of the death penalty is a separate issue from how we'd implement it, if it is too be done.
While I support the death penalty, it would be an extremely rare event, confined to only applying to those so dangerous that allowing them to live will, statistically speaking, result in more death.
Keeping such offenders confined for long periods of time in a proper special handling unit serves the same purpose, but with one less death (the offenders).
Note that I don't have any sort of "soft spot" for dangerous offenders. What I'm more concerned about is a) what it does to those who have to complete the sentence ("the executioner"), and b) what message it sends to society at large. Capital Punishment is less about justice than it is vengeance; I often see a certain harshness in general with many people in the US population when it comes to the penal system that doesn't seem to exist as much elsewhere in the Westernized world, and it's easy to see lots of instances of mass murderers in the US who seem to feel it's their right to go out and take out anyone who has ever wronged them as "retribution" (the case of the recent Santa Barbara rampage would be a good case in point). That's certainly not to say that there aren't other things significant wrong with such people, but when your society glorifies death as a solution to problems, would it be all that surprising to find that maladjusted children who grow up in such a society take that message in the wrong direction?
Back to a) however. You can't execute someone without an executioner, and unless you find an otherwise law-abiding psychopath to do the job, it messes people up. As mentioned in my last post, the Arizona warden who officiated their last gas chamber execution threatened to quit if he ever had to do it again. I recall reading recently that Ronnie Lee Gardiners executioners all asked never to be asked to perform that duty again. Back when many countries still had professional executioners (many less than 100 years ago), many of them wound up being alcoholics with PTSD who had failed marriages and died relatively young (John Robert Radclive, state executioner of Canada between 1892 and 1899, started drinking after one particularly disturbing incident where a sheriff had him hang a man who had died on his way to the gallows; he died of alcohol related illness at the age of 55. On capital punishment, he later in life had this to say: "I had always thought capital punishment was right, but not now. I believe the Almighty will visit the Christian nations with dire calamity if they don't stop taking the lives of their fellows, no matter how heinous the crime. Murderers should be allowed to live as long as possible and work out their salvation on behalf of the State.").
I'm also not a fan of the idea of "the state" killing its own citizens -- for any reason. But I won't get into that at the moment.
That pretty much exhausts what I have to say about the subject, other than to thank-you for the polite and reasoned discourse. It's been interesting to see where our stands on the subject both intersect and diverge. I'm sure we could both agree that the ideal solution would simply be for our fellow citizens to no longer rape, torture, or kill others, mooting such debates in the future.
Yaz